Thoughts of Linus Torvalds on M1 Macs

You’re getting a lot of answers that aren’t outright wrong, but don’t really answer your question of “Why is Apple successful where other companies aren’t.” Or phrased another way, “Why does Apple repeatedly innovate new product categories where other companies can’t?”

As others have pointed out, lots of companies attempt the same thing as Apple and fail before Apple is successful. Others point to marketing, timing, etc as reasons, which I think losses what is fundamentally different about Apple’s approach.

Apple is focused on products, and the user experience, where other companies are focused on technologies. Jobs seems to have built this approach into Apple’s DNA.

There are key differentiators for every product example where “someone else did it first.” For the iPod, no one took the time to deeply consider an interface like the scroll wheel, or a music library (instead of folders). For tablets, other companies considered it from a perspective of bolting it on to their current offerings, instead of rethinking how it enabled new kinds of interactions. For wireless headphones, no other company prioritized size and effortless pairing. That is, in all of these, no company approached the products uniquely from the customer’s perspective and a blank slate, and only then deeply dove into what technology would enable (or forcing the enabling technology into existence).

I think that is the unique thing about Apple. They are excellent technologists and have incredible manufacturing capability, but so do other companies. No other company is so purely driven by the user, nor has such long horizons for decisions (ie, patience), nor has the leverage to create enabling technologies.

This is what Wall Street has totally failed to understand about Apple for decades, and I think a lot of nerds do, too.

A lot of it is second-mover advantage.

Microsoft spent the better part of a decade trying to make tablets work. They poured a ton of money and resources into getting manufacturers on board, developing drivers, refining UIs. Most of it was terrible and clunky, and they had to include increasingly niche features to make them work for the enterprise clients they could land.

The whole time, Apple could afford to wait when doing their own R&D. They could jump in when the hardware was available and affordable without compromises.

Nearly every major product they develop follows this model.

Why do you have this image of Apple might be the better question here.

I was able to afford a PC for a long time before i was able to afford an Apple product.

The PC platform did so much more for every single human being on our planet than any apple product will ever do.

Apple is doing a great job on being the innovative hipster company they are, don't get me wrong.

But Android had an real impact.

Google provided Maps free as one of the first.

I use a MacBook at work and sitll use more Microsoft products. Microsoft has much more products and is much more diverse then Apple. Those are just two totally different companies with different focuses.

Microsoft works on tons of fronts, Apple does that on one and Apple has to succeed in its small focus area while microsoft doesn't.

There were a bunch of in-ear true wireless/cordless headphones that existed prior to Airpods, it's just they didn't have Apple logo on them hence majority of population won't be aware of their existance

https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/31/best-cord-free-wireless-earbu...

Apple tends to make sure they work properly before releasing (usually; please ignore the dodgy keyboards), is a big part of it, I think. Like, Microsoft had an ARM laptop-y thing a couple of years ago, but it was terrible. There were airpod-y things a year or so before the AirPods; they just weren't very good. And so on.

And Apple has a reputation now for releasing new things which more or less work. I'm sure far more people bought an M1 MacBook before the reviews were available than bought an ARM Surface, because there's a fairly strong expectation that the Apple thing will be decent, whereas there's no particular expectation about the Surface (or, if you'd used Microsoft's previous effort, the Surface RT, an _extremely negative_ expectation).

And notice that when Apple _does_ screw up (again, see the keyboard), people get very, very annoyed. Dell XPSes tended to have serious coil whine noise for a few years, but no-one really talked about it; if one MacBook had made an untoward sound we'd be talking about Coilgate for the next five years.

I think commitment to pivotal change is baked into their hardware teams' culture. A lot of the decisions made at Apple that we see in their products aren't decisions that could be made within other organizations. Either because the people don't have the capacity to do make them, or because the organization isn't set up to let them do it and succeed.

Some of these ideas, like converting an entire product category to a different ISA would be celebrated and investigated at Apple but laughed out of the room at Dell or HP.

A bigger part of this aside from culture is that Apple is one of the most vertically integrated manufacturers of consumer goods in the world, and isn't beholden to the whims of suppliers or customers as much as anyone else.

It's because of their loyal customer base. The culture they've developed since the very beginning has set them up as almost too big to fail. Without that "cult"ure you don't get to set up their type of vertical integration.

Apple's impressively good at innovation and execution: at taking something that has potential but also has serious issues and then making it work really well.

It's astonishing how many of their home runs fit into this mold: Mac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, the list goes on...

What proportion of users in each category actually wanted the things you listed in your first paragraph though? With the Arm laptop as an example, I'd take a stab and guess that less than 10% of laptop users even know what ARM means. Aside from that, I tend to agree on your point that Apple seems to hold greater relative power in trend-setting and I think the achievement is through the power of their brand coupled with strong marketing and relatively good user experience to boot.